The effect of presentation paradigm on syntactic processing: An event-related fMRI study.

An event-related fMRI study was conducted to investigate the effect of two different sentence presentation paradigms-rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and whole sentence presentation-on syntactic processing. During scanning, sentences were presented using one of the two presentation paradigms and were followed by a short delay and a probe to verify sentence comprehension. The delay was included in an attempt to separate sentence-related activity from probe-related activity. The behavioral data showed a main effect of syntactic complexity for reaction time and accuracy, and accuracy revealed an interaction between complexity and the presentation paradigm employed-RSVP produced many more errors for syntactically complex sentences than did whole sentence presentation. The imaging data revealed a syntactic complexity effect during the sentence phase in left BA 44 and during the probe phase in left BA 44 and the left posterior MTG. In addition, timecourse analysis revealed that these two regions also showed an interaction between complexity and presentation paradigm such that there was no complexity effect during RSVP but a significant effect during whole sentence presentation. In addition to finding that these two presentation paradigms differentially affected syntactic processing, there were main effects within the visual pathway (V1/V2 vs. V5) and the hippocampus that revealed significant differences in activation between the paradigms.